Amazon promotion fee $100 + 1.5%: what sales cover it before you film

Amazon's Holiday 2026 page states a promotion fee of **$100 per promotion plus 1.5% of promotional sales, capped at $5,000**. The fee is a fixed cost with a percentage on top, so a low-volume product loses a large share of its promotional revenue to it and a high-volume product barely notices it. Do the arithmetic per product before you spend time on a sale clip for it.

The fee at four sales levels

The table applies the formula quoted on the page to round promotional-sales figures. It is arithmetic only, not a forecast, and it ignores every other cost (referral fees, fulfillment, the Oct 15 to Jan 14 peak fees and surcharge the same page lists). Check the page for which deal types the fee applies to and for the exact definition of promotional sales.

Where creative cost fits

Sume's own prices for a sale clip are small next to that fee. A caption job is $0.20 for a video up to 60 seconds (video captions), and a Timeline render is $0.10 per started output minute (Timeline 1.0). A 20-second cut with one caption pass is therefore roughly $0.30 in those two line items, before any generation or editing steps you add. The creative is not the expensive part of a promotion. The fixed $100 is.

So the useful question is not whether the clip is cheap. It is whether this SKU sells enough in the promotion window to justify entering it at all, and whether one clip can serve several SKUs.

A quick fee check

This snippet reproduces the table, including the cap. The cap is reached at about $326,667 of promotional sales, which is the point where more volume stops adding fee.

def fee(promo_sales):
    return min(100 + 0.015 * promo_sales, 5000)

for sales in (1000, 4000, 20000, 100000):
    print(sales, round(fee(sales), 2), f"{fee(sales) / sales:.1%}")

Decision rules that follow

• Under about $1,000 of expected promotional sales the fixed $100 dominates. Consider skipping the promotion or bundling SKUs.
• Between $4,000 and $20,000 the fee is a few percent. Spend creative time here, on one clip per promoted product.
• If the margin after other fees is thinner than the fee percentage, the clip is not the fix.
• Share one hero clip across variants and change only the price cue, rather than filming each variant.

Limits

The page is an Amazon seller-forum announcement, not a fee schedule document. Fee rules, deal types and what counts as a promotion can differ by marketplace and account. Confirm in Seller Central before committing budget.